DreamsI've been keeping a dream journal on a special Twitter account since I was 23 years old. You can read these raw forms, if you'd like: @IHadaDreamWhere. I'm going to be adapting 99 of them as microstories.

Saturdays (mezzofiction)

Missy’s MissionWith the help of a friend, a young woman searches a rogue planet for the rumored means of getting rid of her special time powers, since having them puts her in the crosshairs of a psychotic time traveling killer.

My name is Nick Fisherman III. It's not my real name, but that's not because I'm trying to hide from my former agency, or something. I named myself after someone I've known for most of my life, and he chose it in honor of his late best friend. I took up writing when I found myself failing 8th grade science, and realized I might never reach my dream of becoming a biochemist, a meteorologist, and a quantum physicist. I started developing my canon after a scouting trip to an island inspired what I thought would be my first novel. I founded this website upon the advice of many people, who told me I needed to get my work out there, and not wait for an agent to accept my manuscript. You can expect one new story every day. Weekdays are for microstories, which are one or two paragraphs long. They're usually only thematically linked, so you won't have to read one to understand another, but they do sometimes tell a combined story. Sundays are for my continuous longer story, The Advancement of Leona Matic, which I started in the beginning, and won't end until 2066. Saturdays are for long series, most of which take place in the same universe as Leona, and add to the larger mythology.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Microstory 563: The Quake That Never Was

Two weeks ago, a minor seismic tremor shook the Usonian west coast. No big deal, we deal with them every time. No one was hurt, and we suffered very little damage. But something was different about it. This tremor wasn’t supposed to be minor at all...it was actually shaping up to be the largest in recorded history. Science, for now, has given us no way to significantly predict major seismic activity before it begins, but the same does not go for predicting an active tremor’s growth. By measuring the increase in intensity over even a short period of time, seismologists have learned to determine just how big the quake will ultimately be. This on its own serves little practical purpose, for getting the word out to the public how bad it’s going to get once it gets worse than it already is can’t ever really help. However, this research is a necessary step to predicting quakes with enough time to warn people of its danger, and even possibly halting a quake’s progress. This may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s technically already happened before. With this one. Several separate teams of seismologists were in decent enough locations to measure the seismic activity for this particular tremor. By combining their data, they discovered that it was simply not as large as it should have been. Its ultimate effects should have been devastating for anyone close to its epicenter. So why was it so minor? Well, technically it wasn’t, because what actually happened was that it simply stopped. After but a few moments of a steady increase in intensity, it suddenly began to dissipate at an even faster rate; faster than could be considered physically probable. Plenty of scientists in the field are studying the possibility of halting quakes, but as far as the industry as a whole knows, no one has been successful. It’s possible that this research is being done in secret, yet no team has come forward with their findings. They are either keeping it under wraps even still, or something else is going on. Already, certain religious groups are using this as an opportunity to promote their faith, claiming some divine intervention. We may never know what truly happened with this tremor, but I think most of us hopes that it happens again.